3 reasons why a startup should start SEO from their real first day

One question I keep on being asked is: “We are a startup, shall we worry about doing SEO?”. In the past, I would answer this by saying no to worry about SEO during the initial phase. SEO is a long term strategy – particularly compared to more “direct” approaches such as PPC or PR – with low flexibility.

In the past, indeed, once chosen your main keywords – or money keywords as SEO specialist like to call them – it was not advisable changing them too often. That means that if you were about to change your business model very often – thus updating your site to reflect them – you would show Google instability. Many SEOs would then advise you no to change tags too often for avoiding penalizations.

Things, however, have drastically changed since, and nowadays, Google has been adapting to the most lean startup approaches; platforms such as WordPress have also updated their solution to keep up with these changes .

In this article, we will be listing 3 main reasons why startups should do SEO as soon as they have got a site or even a web page in place.

A different way to use the internet

Today’s era has taken a wide turn towards the digital realm. The digital world has opened doors to new and advanced ways of interaction without the possibility of return. People consume the internet using all the new and advanced tools that are given to them, most of them free or at minimal costs. The way how people research their needs and consume information pass through the internet in 99% of the cases and marketers have been long ago realized that and included in their campaigns.

Whenever we need to find something over the internet, we instantly Google it. In this scenario, SEO has become then the backbone of all the tools that help you improve your digital presence. SEO (Search Engine Optimization) – a set of techniques and rules that help you rank higher among various search engines – encompasses a complex process at the back end through which Google filters results against our search queries.

Let us list the three important stages of SEO and then discuss a few important elements which establish SEO as the core behind a formidable online presence. Unlike in the past SEO has gained a large share of online visibility; simply putting it is impossible to think of online visibility without including SEO on it.

You are about to embrace a long-run, start asap

SEO is a set of many stages. That means that the implementation of all the required steps and the actual collection of results will take time. Each stage brings in a unique element of its own which make the overall strategy successful. Indeed there are 3 basic stages of SEO which can be termed as follows:

Technical Stage

On-site implementation

Off-site implementation

The first stage refers to promoting the easy identification of your pages by ‘Google’s spiders and their crawling activities. Any technical problem is tackled in this stage that might be detrimental for your presence.

The second stage refers to all the on-page activities like content quality, website load time, dynamic/static elements. You need to make your page user-friendly as to provide the crawlers with sufficient material to understand.

The third and the final stage is directly related to improving your rankings over Search Engines through activities like establishing strong backlinking profiles. This is undoubtedly the most important stage in which you have to put in continuous efforts to get a better ranking.

Another important element to be introduced is the quality score. Quality score refers to how dependable and impressive search engines deem your website. A good quality score is based on a wide array of elements, particularly SEO related concerns. Your website loading speed, for instance, reflects how effective each element is and this would also result in a low bounce rate. Similarly, the attractiveness of your webpages and the engaging content will make people stay for longer intervals and Google considers this is a positive indicator towards your digital presence.

The quality score takes a long time to be built cause it affects directly your rankings; the sooner you start, the sooner you have chances to succeed.

When we Google something, whether with the objective to learn something new or with the intent of buying something, we generally depend on the first few search results. We consider these credible and relevant links and so does Google, which is why they are displayed at the top.

There is a complex ranking process working at the back through which websites are ranked. The more relevant the content is on a website against your search query, the higher is the probability that it will be displayed at the top.

Granted what discussed above – that you need SEO is you want to be visible on the internet – you should then start your SEO campaign asap to collect results in the shortest time possible.

SEO helps you become a leader in your field

In this world of ever-rising competition, the key is to come out on top of everyone. For a smaller setup, you need to improve your ranking which SEO can help you achieve readily. There is a major benefit here for ‘SME’s as being recognized by Google ‘doesn’t necessarily mean that you have to spend big. It just requires you to be active, smart and vigilant in your SEO efforts. A number of instances we might observe small businesses getting a better-listed rank based on how effective their SEO practices are. If for instance, your competitor is lagging behind in their SEO related efforts, you need to cash this opportunity. Analyzing your competitor ‘wouldn’t be a bad call here and you can use a number of tools to do that.

Moz and SEMrush are among the top analytical tools for analyzing websites whether your own or the ones which you target to compete with. If your page load speed is low in comparison, you should integrate elements more effectively to overcome that. One important aspect which you need to consider in your journey to improvement is that your internet connection should be a formidable one. You ‘don’t want your load time to suffer or the dynamics elements to stutter based solely on an undependable internet connection. False information can misdirect your efforts that will hurt your business. Therefore, make sure that you have a stronger option like ATT Uverse backing your cause.

Backlinking is a core metric behind any successful SEO strategy. To give you a general idea, the stronger the sources are which link to your website, the stronger you will be considered as per Google algorithms. While carrying out backlinking practices, you are bringing in relevant links. For instance, if you have an education-oriented website, linking it to a food portal ‘wouldn’t be the best practice. Facilitating services can be linked through which rightly benefits your offerings, its credibility, and its overall ranking.

An effective SEO should go along with a good Social Media practice. You actively use social media platforms in your daily routine. With so much happening over these communication platforms, the growing business activities over these mediums is only justified. A stronger social media presence is quite important to gain success in the online world. Well, the realm of SEO ‘isn’t just limited to making your webpages effective. SEO for social media and vice versa is rising in popularity as Google has hinted that these two entities are linked towards a better search ranking. For instance, if a post gets tweeted or shared extensively, then that hints towards useful/trending content and this improves your ranking.

You need to make sure that you are actively participating in your social media activities along with promoting your content. This naturally diverts more traffic towards your offerings through these channels and if visiting audience does find your content useful, they will definitely improve your quality score.

Working on all these tactics will surely translate in higher visibility for your business and we are quite positive that you will have a better idea regarding how important SEO is in the modern world. Just remember to be consistent in your efforts and surely y